Secrets
by SmallSerpent
Summary: Evan muses about the evolution of his relationship with Cappie. If you fear slash or spoilers, do not enter.


**Author's Note:**** First fic in this fandom, so forgive me if it seems to ramble a bit. It is really more of a starting point for some later work. A chance to get my thoughts out, if you will. **

**Warnings:**** SLASH. It's nothing graphic, but it is quite blatant. Also, SPOILERS. Huge, nasty, in-your-face, I-just-ruined-this-entire-season-for-you style spoilers for virtually **_**everything**_** up to and including Season 2, Episode 18, "Divine Secrets and the ZBZ sisterhood". **

**Disclaimer:**** ABC Family owns Greek, Evan, Cappie, Casey, Patrick, Cyprus-Rhodes University, Camp Kitchiwawa, the Amphora Society, and more-or-less everything that you see here. I'm just crawling around in Evan's mind for some giggles, and I make absolutely no money off of writing this. **

* * *

After all of these years, he had expected something more thrilling. As Evan Chambers watched himself meticulously follow the directions that he'd carved into his memory his Freshman year, he had to begrudgingly admit to himself that the fun had been entirely in the chase.

Evan knew that he'd never really given a shit about actually _finding_ the Amphora Society. It had been a wild dream of Cappie's, and Evan had gone along with it in a desperate attempt to prevent their friendship from becoming another causality of the Omega Chi and Kappa Tau feud. They'd never had the slightest idea what they would **do** with a secret society if they found it. Cappie had insisted that the fame would be its own reward, but Evan strongly doubted that they would have been able to live with themselves if they had gone public with their findings. They had talked of forcing the Society to accept them as members, but Even couldn't imagine that being nearly as rewarding as becoming members the traditional way.

Now that they _were_ members, the irony of it all was striking. As Freshmen, they had spent countless hours in their room discussing all of the things that they could do _together_ as member of the Amphora Society. They would have given anything for the chance to drink form that cup, one after the other, and become one with each other and the Society. As Seniors, Cappie had almost given up the entire Society just because he couldn't stomach the thought of sharing it with Evan.

Immediately, Evan had swallowed that insult and begged the Elders to give Cappie a second chance. Now, however, the problem had been smoothed over, the danger had passed, the impropriety had been forgotten, and the memory made Evan ill. He'd returned to the house seeing red that night. Though he _loathed_ the realization, he couldn't remember what he'd done to the first handful of pledges that he'd found. He hadn't slept that night. The morning after, he hadn't been able to take notes in his Government class because he couldn't stop thinking about it.

He was a good brother. He would admit to flaws as a boyfriend. He would grant that he'd made several mistakes as a friend. He had never, however, done anything but strive to be the best brother he possibly could, and even Cappie couldn't deny that. Evan gave Patrick everything that he asked for, and even defended him to their parents, while a lesser man would surely have just let his the lazy runaway lie in the bed that he'd made. Evan had devoted the last four years of his life to Omega Chi, when he could easily have let his name carry him through the pledging process and relaxed for four years. He'd fought with everything he had to keep his little brother in the house after Ashleigh told blew his secret, and it really hadn't had anything to do with Cappie. Evan's relationship with Cappie had been... complicated, since their Freshman year, and the thought of losing Calvin to Kappa Tau had been unpleasant, but not everything had to be part of some hidden agenda. He had worked to keep Calvin because he'd wanted Calvin.

Even their personal issues didn't justify that sort of reaction. Evan had never even done anything particularly bad to Cappie. Casey hadn't been the only one who'd gotten even with Evan after Rush Night their Junior year, and Casey had been Evan's **only** sin against Cappie, even after they went their separate ways. Despite all of the anger and spite that they'd felt for each other over the last three years, Evan had never crossed any truly important lines. Evan remained the only other soul on campus who knew Cappie's real name. Evan had put his entire house on the line to protect Cappie's. Evan had done his best not to blame Cappie for his relationship problems with Casey.

None of those things had been easy to do. Cappie had never let Casey go, and on more than one night, his desperate attempts to get her back had left Evan _aching_ to destroy that ridiculous pretty-boy face. Yet he never had. Their fights very seldom escalated to a physical level, and when they did, it was Cappie who'd started it the overwhelming majority of the time.

...Yet Evan was the bad guy. Eternally. Casey had never cheated. Cappie had never slept with another man's girlfriend. Frannie had never just wanted to hurt someone. Evan was the only one in the world to commit the sins that he had committed. That had been the consensus for so long that Evan had started to believe it.

Evan had waited years for Cappie to validate how he'd felt Freshman year, if not what he'd done, and now that Cappie had, Evan was slightly disturbed to find that it didn't matter. It was a band-aid on a bullet wound. Evan was over Casey, but he was not over Cappie. A history like theirs was not easily forgotten, and Casey Cartwright had caused only the first of many metaphorical knives that they'd shoved into each other over the last few years.

...But "not over Cappie" was a rather melodramatic way to put it. There wasn't much to be over. Whatever they'd had probably didn't count as a romantic relationship. They hadn't seen it as one, either, for more than a few years when they were too young to realize what a romantic relationship really was.

They'd shared their first kiss at five years old, on their hands and knees in the dirt behind the Mess Hall, not because they'd wanted to kiss _each other_, but because they'd both wanted to kiss _someone_. Evan had walked in on his then thirteen-year-old brother kissing Amy Powell, and after careful thought and a healthy dose of sibling rivalry, Evan had decided that if there was anything their parents would disapprove of more strongly than they would disapprove of Patrick kissing the daughter of an accountant, it was Evan kissing the son of the art teachers. Cappie had agreed to kiss Evan because _he_ couldn't imagine a reason why anyone would disapprove. Neither Patrick nor their parents had ever found out, but Evan had always felt that he'd won anyway.

From then on, it had been Evan's favorite summer-time game. Kickball, hiking, and even the universally beloved canoeing paled in comparison to the frantic treks around the campground with "Would we get caught here?" playing on a loop in his mind. At first, Cappie hadn't seemed to enjoy playing the game nearly as much as he enjoyed watching Evan play. He would squeeze Evan's hand and make the Chambers boy half-drag him through the woods, never suggesting a hiding-place, though he knew the campgrounds more intimately than Evan could ever hope to, until Evan was on the verge of quitting.

The young spawn of hippies was not a reluctant lover, though, just a confused one. Cappie had been unschooled in the most extreme manor by parents who lived in an RV and spent the months not lost at camp Kitchiwawa traveling endlessly with no particular destination in mind. Society's views on gender and sexuality were as much an enigma to Cappie as Evan Chambers himself, who was dropped off in a limo by eternally frowning parents in suits and attended an expensive private school, was. By age nine, Cappie understood, and he played the game with twice the passion that Evan did. Cappie had always been the braver of the two, and thrived on constantly increasing the danger in their meetings. When Cappie took over, they went from quickly pecking each other on the mouth in the middle of the woods to holding their lips together in unlocked art supply closets.

During a highly informative talk with Patrick, Evan discovered making-out at age ten, and the games at Camp Kitchiwaw momentarily took a much sloppier turn. The weeks wore on, though, and they got better. They began speaking to each other when they drew away for air. At first it was simple instructions (_"Tilt your head—like that!" "You're supposed to close your eyes!"_) and then later it became purely for the joy of speaking to each other. They could discuss anything from their parents to the latest season of Yu-Gi-Oh while they tried to figure out how the counselors made this look so easy.

Then, something changed. Overnight, every other boy in their cabin got a girlfriend. The disease spread, and soon every other boy at _camp_ had paired off with a girl. Whispers began to echo throughout the campgrounds, and within three weeks, even Cappie's parents were wondering why they showed no interest in their more feminine campmates. The pair ignored the rest of the world and made up excuses for as long as they could, but eventually they had to be honest: As long as they had each other, they had no interest in girls. And that meant that something was wrong.

They had to get girlfriends. By the end of their fifth summer at Camp Kitchiwawa, that conclusion was inevitable. But they could go out with each other _too_, they decided. They had never seen their relationship like that before, but the idea of having a relationship with a girl that was closer than their relationship they shared with each other was nauseating, and as they prepared to enter the fifth grade, they would probably have guessed that "infidelity" was a flavor of ice-cream.

And so the years went on. By the time their ninth and last year as campers at Camp Kitchiwawa rolled around, Evan had gone out with half of the middle-school girls at his school, and Cappie had gone out with half of the middle-school girls in the country. Each boy had watched girl after girl pass through his life, and each boy had felt girl after girl bore him out of his mind. Secretly, Evan was desperately looking forward to his upcoming four years at the all-boys boarding school that Patrick had so loathed, and he had never been able to shake the feeling that _Cappie_ was secretly longing for Evan to spend four years in an all-boys boarding school, too. In hind-sight, Evan was certain that they both knew why this was, though neither had the guts to say it. Neither of them would _ever_ have the guts to say it.

High school started, and at once everything became a thousand times more serious. Cappie's dating pool expanded as his parents began protesting the mistreatment of seals in Canada, and it wouldn't have been prudent for him to ignore those new girls. Evan had not been naïve enough to expect a great deal of tolerance from his new classmates, and they did not surprise him. Both boys continued to half-heartedly go through girl after girl, more out of obligation than desire, and though Evan found himself more than once actually attracted to the young women that he invited back to his dorm room on pretense, he heaved a sigh of relief every May as he boarded the plane home, and tried to ignore the butterflies in his stomach every June as he headed to camp.

Evan continued to meet Cappie at Camp Kitchiwawa, now as counselors. Evan couldn't recall the exact moment when the pair decided that they were ready to take their relationship to the next level, or even if they _had_ decided it out-loud; It seemed to be a mutual conclusion the moment they sat down in the Mess Hall for the Welcome Meeting after Evan's freshman year. In his testosterone-infested dorm room, Evan had discovered porn, and Cappie had started to listen to the inappropriate encouragement from his parents' "friends". Whatever either boy hadn't been willing to try with stuck-up prep-school brats or stoned run-aways, he was all too willing to try with the other.

It was not difficult for them to get away with things at Camp Kitchiwawa. The few camp employees who didn't simply roll their eyes and let Cappie be Cappie pissed themselves when they realized that Cappie's playmate was Evan Chambers. The pair felt no guilt about abusing that. On their first night as Camp Kitchiwawa counselors, Evan was woken by keys jingling beside his head. The memory now makes that noise almost unbearable. When his eyes opened and he turned around, Evan found Cappie clutching the keys to the art building. Three summers later, Evan finally stopped feeling guilty about letting kids make lanyards on that table.

During the academic year, life went on as though summer didn't exist. The pair spoke nearly weekly over the phone, but out of a combination of fear of exposure and anticipation for the next summer, the conversations seldom consisted of more than five sentences combined to assure each other that they were still alive. Evan took preppy girls to dances, and Cappie blogged about the horrors of the war with hippy girls. Those were their "real" relationships. No matter what they felt for each other or how strongly the felt it, it wasn't allowed to be real. Their paths crossed only during the summer, and summer flings weren't real. This had been their system for as long as they'd thought to have a system, and neither had dreamt of changing it until the April afternoon when Cappie informed Evan that he'd won a full-ride scholarship to Cyprus-Rhodes University.

Everything after that was a disastrous blur. Rush Week ended with the exact result that Evan had been hoping to avoid, and things started to crumble. After eighteen years of avoiding the more dangerous aspects of his parents' lifestyle, Cappie caved into the drugs and the sex that his new family worshiped. Evan's parents, horrified by the possibility that Evan might repeat Patrick's mistakes, tightened Evan's leash until he could barely breathe, and Evan caved under the pressure from them and from his brothers and hit his books with Law School in mind.

Then Casey came along. It hadn't been that either of them had loved Casey _more_ than he'd loved the other. It had simply been that both of them had loved Casey in a different way than he'd loved the other. They'd both loved Casey in the way that _mattered_. They could actually _say_ that they were attracted to Casey and that they loved her, and they could never say that about each other, no matter how true it was.

They should have stopped the moment they realized that. They should have known that it wasn't worth it, and neither of them should have ever thought about Casey Cartwright ever again. There were other girls at CRU—_thousands_ of other girls. They could easily have moved on, fallen for different girls, and never let their relationship—or their **not**-relationship, as they had both grown to think of it—change.

The bitter irony of it all was that, in the end, the only person who had won the game was the only person who'd never had any right to play. Casey was wearing another man's letters. Cappie had lost her. Evan had lost her. They'd lost each other along the way.

Evan blamed it all on stupidity. They'd thought that they could pledge competing houses and compete with each other for a girl, and that it would all be alright because they had some stupid book full of questionably obtained notes on a society that ninety percent of the world believed was a fairytale. What had they been thinking?

And then it hit Evan. It had not been all in the case after all. The hunt for the Amphora Society had not saved them, but was never supposed to. _Finding_ the Amphora Society was supposed to save them. The talk of exposing it for fame or blackmailing it for membership had been all on pretence. At some point, they had both become convinced that the Amphora Society was a magical entity that would grant their wish, if only they could locate it.

No less, they'd been so very _stupid_.

Evan stopped and stared down the tunnel. The map ended right here. Evan didn't need to see it to know that. They'd never made it farther than this spot; right beside that long black smear on the wall and directly underneath the Chemistry Lab where he had shared his last kiss with Cappie. When it occurred to Evan that if they'd gone four-hundred yards farther, they would have walked right onto the site of the Amphora Society's initiations, Evan didn't know whether to laugh or kick himself.

His body decided on the former without his mind's consent, and as Evan felt the muscles in his mouth twitch up against his will, he remembered exchanging smiles with Cappie for the first time in well over two years.

So much had changed in two days. Cappie had apologized. They were brothers in the Amphora Society. Evan had pinched himself a thousand times, and it hadn't been a dream.

Maybe he'd been too quick to judge his younger self. Maybe they hadn't just been stupid Freshman. Maybe finding the Amphora Society really would save them, just not as quickly as they had hoped.


End file.
